Friday, November 25, 2016

Makhaevism Making a Comeback

Paul
Goble

Staunton, November 25 – Makhaevism, the
term of abuse its opponents a century ago gave to the view among many working
class Russians that the intelligentsia was more culturally alien and hostile to
them than were even the rich, appears to be making a comeback, albeit in today’s
hybrid world not under its own name.

Indeed, it appears to be a better
description of the attitudes of many working class people across the world today
and also and especially importantly to the way wealthy leaders are exploiting this
anger in ways that ultimately work against that interests of those who feel it than
do many of the terms now applied to the various tectonic shifts taking place
around the world.

On the one hand, hostility to
educated cultural elites explains the voting and polling behavior of workers
better than class interests. Thus, many working class people in many places
view such elites as alien and out of touch with their needs even while supporting
those who have or have gained great wealth.

And on the other, one of the basic
failings of Makhaevism, its lack of a solution to this problem except to call
for a permanent general strike by the workers against the educated, points to
an outcome that history has seen before: the rise of authoritarian populism
which in the name of protecting the workers from the alien cultural elite ends
by defending those in power.

The term comes from the
denunciations by Lenin and then Stalin of the writings of Jan Waclaw Machajski
(1866-1926), a Polish Marxist of anarcho-syndicalist tendencies. (For
background, see Paul Avrich, “What is Makhaevism’?” Soviet Studies, July 1965, available online at theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-avrich-what-is-makhaevism;
Marshall Shatz, Jan Wavlaw Machajski (Pittsburgh, 1989), and Albert Parry’s
introduction to the collection of Machayski’s writings collected and
republished as Umstvennyy rabochy
(New York, 1968).

Lenin first denounced Machajski and
Makhaevism both because the Polish writer’s argument was fundamentally non-Marxist
in that it viewed cultural and educational divides as deeper than economic ones
and because it threatened Lenin’s Bolshevik Party which included far more
intellectuals than workers.

In the early and mid-1920s, Stalin
joined in that denunciation, viewing it as a useful tool in his campaign against
his better educated opponents in the Bolshevik party by playing to the
hostility of many workers and peasants against a class they often despised as “those
who wore glasses” and deserved to be killed rather than listened to.

Later in the mid-1930s, after he had
vanquished his more educated Old Bolshevik opponents and sought to promote
support for the new Soviet intelligentsia, Stalin too joined in the denunciation
of Makhaevism among the Soviet population as something antithetical to the
interests of Marxism-Leninism.